


that young, hot millennial anthem

by yoonbot (iverins)



Category: fromis_9 (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Coming of Age, Complicated Relationships, F/F, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, Previous M/F Relationship, Recreational Drug Use
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-19
Updated: 2019-08-19
Packaged: 2020-09-07 09:34:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,090
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20307307
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iverins/pseuds/yoonbot
Summary: In order to overcome fear, Jisun staunchly prescribed to the logic of exposing yourself to the fearful agent over and over again. In eighth grade, it'd been rated R horror movies that she pirated onto her brother's old laptop until it became infected with a virus. Eleventh grade, getting into Jiwon's car again after witnessing her running over her neighbor's mailbox. And, in her sophomore year of college, it just happened to be penises.Or: Gyuri and Jisun have history together. Jisun doesn't want to talk about it.





	that young, hot millennial anthem

**Author's Note:**

> **Written for GG Jukebox Round 1, inspired by FEVER by Carly Rae Jepsen**  
thank you mods for running this event (and putting up with me TT)! ♡ i love crj and especially this song and was very happy to write for it ♡ 
> 
> here's a [playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/61OhG6LPjSw5z8g3ZGTHMy?si=8qWiZFZbRtS6LwEK2RiMUA) of songs that i think match the mood of the fic!
> 
> **additional warnings:** brief moment of suicidal ideation.

NOW

Jisun's halfway up the hill when she realizes several things.

1) Her legs are actually too short for Gyuri's bike. What had been a mild discomfort pedaling on the flat road quickly becomes an inefficient system of work on the incline, and frankly, Jisun's always hated being the shorter one between the two of them. And, 2) maybe this wasn't such a great idea actually, taking the bike without asking in the first place. Hot-headed Jisun thought it was genius though, thought she was really sticking it to Gyuri – like some big _FUCK YOU!_ spelled out using fireworks in the night sky, an untimely two weeks after the fourth of July – except she noticed ten minutes ago that there’d been a net of cobwebs beneath the handlebars. She’d tried wiping them away at a stoplight before some car honked at her. She gave the driver a middle finger, and they just sped past her once the bike lane reappeared.

Also, 3) she can't see jack shit from where she skids to a stop in the middle of the road because the trees are in the way. Fuck greenery, honestly, Jisun thinks as she sits down on the curb, the concrete cold even through her jeans. Her worn-in leather jacket smells like the night too, holds onto whatever it's been exposed to in the last fifteen minutes like someone desperate for love before exhaling soundlessly on the release. And fuck every goddamn suburb and all the people who drive at exactly speed limit in them, too. And, while she's at it, _fuck Gyuri Jang._

Jisun wanted to scream about it an hour ago. She still could now, if she really wanted to. But then again, this is a residential street, and someone might call the cops on her for it and well, that would kind of fucking suck.

Instead, she just sits there on that curb, silent, listening to the crickets. Jisun imagines that if she had a little cricket voice like that, she'd be screaming alongside with them, all night long.

3 HOURS AGO

No one told Jisun this but: going back to where you had your first kiss is like returning to a crime scene. It's like there's white tape covering the sheets of Gyuri's bed – outlining where they'd sat cross-legged when it happened, facing each other, ankles intersecting – and the familiar feeling of butterflies flooding through her entire sixteen-year-old body from the anticipation, and the whole house is just frozen in this little snowglobe of time, resettling into equilibrium even after being shaken occasionally in her memory, unchanging.

_It'll be fun!_ Or at least that's what Jiwon last sent her at 10:52PM, active 9 hours ago. She showed up in front of Jisun's house at seven-thirty, apropos of nothing, with her headlights off even in the dusk, honking until Jisun tripped tugging on her old Converse while climbing down the steps of her front porch.

"I can't believe you two are still friends," her mom offhandedly commented as Jisun tried to chase a silverfish out of her left shoe. Come to think of it, she hadn't worn them since high school graduation – "You think you're _so_ baller," Jiwon had rolled her eyes in her own à la working-woman-in-her-late-thirties white pumps as they lined up for their diplomas, "but the truth is that you're honestly just a poser who wants to be loved." At least she'd had the decency to look wholly sympathetic – and before the 10:52 message, the last time she and Jiwon had talked was when they both came home over winter break, at least six months ago.

That was the thing: high school friendships were more forged out of necessity than anything else. Remove the clinging-to-a-buoy-in-the-stormy-sea-of-everyone's-puberty part and you'd get the real, found-herself-in-college Jisun – intentionally friendless, alone, and liked it that way.

And Jisun guess that's what leads to the other thing: maybe the cabin fever of it all is what got her to go to Gyuri Jang's college graduation get-together in the first place.

There's the better side of town, and the nice side of town, and then there's the _really_ nice side of town, and that's where Gyuri lives. Jisun knows because she stared out the window, Jiwon talking over the playlist of top 40 hits that she's been playing in her car since their parents suggested that they carpool to school together in eleventh grade, and remembered how she used to joke that all the houses on Gyuri's street were built in the stereotypical American Dream-style. Gyuri's eyes would curl into crescents as she laughed about it somewhat apologetically, like being well-off was something she would always have to be sorry for.

"Hey, did you know," Jiwon starts conspiratorially, interrupting Jisun's train of thought at a stop sign. She finally turned her headlights on. "That Gyuri had a thing with Hayoung Song last summer?"

"Oh." Jisun wonders, briefly, if it'd be a good idea to manually unlock her passenger side door and jump out of the car. Jiwon does drive a little fast for suburban residential roads. "Did she." Her voice sounds soulless to her own ears.

"_Yeah,_” says Jiwon as she slows to pull into Gyuri's driveway. "Apparently it was crazy. They were all like – _our Gyuri?_ And _our Hayoung?_” She shakes her head, laughing. “None of the parents could understand. My mom almost had a heart attack telling me about it."

"Cool," Jisun manages to say. Jiwon parks, shuts her headlights off. As Jisun's slamming her door closed she realizes she should've clarified that she meant about the story, not Jiwon's mom's possible cardiac arrest. Jiwon already looks over it, though, and if she's not, she doesn't let it show as they let themselves into Gyuri's house, climbing the stairs to where they hear giggling in Gyuri's bedroom.

Jisun doesn't know what she was expecting. Where there used to be a clump of push-pinned-into-the-drywall calendars and multi-colored sticky notes on the walls is just emptiness, and the Jonas Brothers Camp Rock era poster that had been above her bed, watching over them the afternoon they kissed like three overly-enthusiastic marriage officiants, is noticeably gone. In its place is an evenly taped-up poster of some K-pop boy group Jisun vaguely remembers seeing on American prime time television once after her mom kept texting her about it. It looks new, other than the slightly rolled-up bottom corners.

And past all that is Hayoung, Saerom Lee, Myungji Kim, and Gyuri sitting on the floor around this plush pink carpet, and the smell of weed. The joint in question is caught between Gyuri's index and middle finger, and Jisun can't ignore the fact that the bottoms of her and Hayoung’s feet are pressed together, Hayoung wiggling her chipping-manicured toes in the air. And Gyuri's changed out her old Hello Kitty comforter for something Plain Jane and lavender, hanging halfway off the bed from where they’re sitting with their backs pressed against it.

"We've arrived!" Jiwon announces in her fake deep voice imitation she's been using since this eighth grade play she'd dragged Jisun into participating in with her, where she played the grandfather and Jisun had been assigned as "Tree number two." She dog-piles herself into the middle of their little circle while Jisun can't stop staring at those conjoined feet. Ignorant to anything being out-of-place, Saerom laughs loudly. Hayoung starts patting Jiwon's butt. And, when Jisun finally brings herself to look, Gyuri just stares at her, still standing in her doorway.

It's a little like a slap in the face. "Oh," she starts, belatedly. Jisun watches as she brings the joint to her lips again, inhales. It's a little like overwriting a save file by hitting the icon over and over repeatedly in the course of the past three minutes.

Gyuri then exhales, but she looks completely devoid of any kind of high. "Hey Jisun." It comes out a little slurred. It also comes out a little like, _damn, four years have really passed and shit's still like this between us, huh?_

"Hey." And god, Jisun thinks, if it isn't fucking awful. 

FOUR YEARS AGO

Gyuri and Jisun had history together. Literally. That's how they'd met, and ended up in Gyuri's bedroom with the door closed, and, probably thanks to Gyuri, both got A's that semester.

"She's a good influence on you," Jisun remembers her mom telling her over dinner one day. It'd been her junior year and Gyuri's senior, and when they weren't poring over musty library books about U.S presidents, they were talking about they couldn't wait to get out of their parent's houses and go to some faraway college, like every suburban girl's fairy tale. Jisun also remembers feeling vaguely sorry for dissing her mom earlier with Gyuri. "That Jang girl."

Back in high school, that's how everyone liked to think – like anyone who could bring your grades up by ten percent was basically a Nobel Laureate. Jisun just rolled her eyes into her soup bowl and kept her mouth shut.

Even before the history project, Jisun knew Gyuri peripherally from a mix of Saturday Korean school and from this clique formed among half the moms of their class. They'd talked in hushed tones amidst the non-fiction section of the library over the weekends while their kids were being tutored, and Jisun remembers Jiwon getting allergies sitting in the dusty corner where they always had class. And Gyuri, even though she was a year above Jisun in public school, had a birthday past the cut-off date for Korean school, so she'd been stuck in Jisun and Jiwon's class up until eighth grade, when her parents stopped forcing her to go.

That said, Jisun doesn't remember having a full conversation with Gyuri until she'd leaned over a week into their second unit and Gyuri asked if they could share her textbook since she'd forgotten her own at home. Whatever shampoo she used smelled fruity and sweet, and Jisun brought her seat closer and balanced her book between their desks.

"Are you seriously doing your history project with _Gyuri Jang?_" Jiwon had asked her the lunch period after they'd been assigned. "Saerom told me," Jiwon supplied when Jisun looked at her, eyes narrowed in suspicion. Jiwon'd been the one to ding Jisun for signing up for advanced history that year, anyway.

"Yeah," Jisun grunted in reply. It'd also been like this: between the two sections of the class being offered, she and Gyuri were stuck in the period with a bunch of kids who'd never taken an AP before and spent Mondays before the bell rang trying to copy each other's outlines. Really, it only made sense for them to become partners.

Jiwon played with the saran wrap of her jam sandwich. "Are you trying to make her carry your dead weight?"

"_Hey,_" Jisun protested. But she understood the sentiment. Where Jisun usually pulled more B's than A's, Gyuri was a 4.5 GPA kind of student. Everyone knew she was probably going to be her year's valedictorian, get into a highly-ranked school, and leave this suburban hell-hole for good.

And Gyuri lived close enough to school that she biked to and from every day. "It's _so_ embarrassing," she'd insisted the first day she invited Jisun over, undoing her lock at the school's bike rack. She pointed at the Keroppi and Tinkerbell stickers, half-scratched off, that were stuck all over the frame. "I've had this bike since forever, don't make fun of me!" As she said it, though, she'd been grinning, and it was the first time Jisun noticed that her two front teeth were a little uneven and large. Jisun smiled back, miming that her lips were sealed.

But that was Gyuri – for the most part perfect, but also slightly not, and it was in those little lapses that were supposed to make her seem more human that Jisun felt like even when they were sitting side-by-side on Gyuri's bedroom floor, she didn't know what Gyuri was really thinking at all.

The day they'd finished the project, they lounged around in Gyuri's bed, waiting for their report to finish printing. "Have you ever kissed someone?" Gyuri asked suddenly and without warning, staring at her ceiling.

Jisun turned her head from staring at Gyuri's wheezing printer. The sun was setting, and half of Gyuri's room was dark from it while the other was still lit up by the slowly dying rays. "No," she answered, honest. It was usually Jiwon who'd talk about boys to her, and Jisun always just hmm-ed along to be polite, even though all the guys in their grade were lackluster at best. "Why?"

Gyuri sighed. "Jaehyun Jung asked me to go to homecoming with him." She rearranged herself from how she'd been sitting, knees to her chest, crossing her legs to face Jisun instead.

"Oh." Jaehyun Jung was soccer team captain, or something. Smart, too. Jisun only knows because Jiwon used to have a badly-concealed thing for him during their sophomore year and wouldn't stop blabbing about it for five months. "Cool. Did you say yes?"

Gyuri shook her head. "Saerom said I was crazy for it. Like, _you know how many girls would kill to go to homecoming with Jaehyun Jung!_" She imitated Saerom's nasally voice. "And he was nice about it," she shrugged. "But it's like – " she smoothed out an imperceptible wrinkle in her bed sheets, " – I don't _like_ him or anything."

"Then what about the kissing?" Jisun asked.

"The kissing..." Gyuri trailed off. She stopped smoothing out her bed sheets to sit on her hands. "I don't know – I feel like I've never liked someone so much that I wanted to kiss them. So I was just," she shrugged again, "wondering, I guess. If you have."

Jisun felt her palms turn numb and staticky, looking at Gyuri sitting on her own. "But kissing doesn't mean you have to like the other person," she pointed out. Not like she'd ever kissed anyone before, either. "Maybe you just – you just _want to_ in the moment, or something."

Gyuri frowned. Jisun's fingers started to tingle. "But I think you'd want to like them, right?"

"I don't know." They'd been talking about it for long enough that the printer had finally finished spitting out their report. The silence was eerie and almost too much. Gyuri looked back to the ceiling, tilting her head upward until her lips, set neutrally into a line, were the only feature Jisun could see on her face. "I guess." For some reason, Jisun couldn't stop herself from staring.

She scooted herself closer until their ankles crossed. Purely by firing impulse, Jisun reached over and gently held Gyuri's chin between her thumb and index finger, guiding her gaze down from the ceiling to meet hers. It struck her how much, in that moment, that she wanted to know what it'd feel like to have Gyuri's mouth against her own.

This Jisun remembers: she leaned in slowly, and quiet, and Gyuri's eyelids fluttered closed right before Jisun pressed their lips together. This Jisun remembers: after a beat of stillness, Gyuri kissed her back. Gyuri kissed her back.

This Jisun also remembers: the sound of the front door slamming closed downstairs scared them apart. "I should go," Jisun heard her own voice come from a distance, as if disembodied. _Yeah,_ Gyuri echoed, still breathless. _You should,_ but Jisun had already grabbed her things and left.

Gyuri handed in their report to the teacher the next day. Jisun doesn't remember if she looked at her when she did it, because she remembers trying not to look at Gyuri at all. She smelled the scent of Gyuri's fruity shampoo, cloyingly sweet, for the rest of class.

And Gyuri didn't tell her this, but she said yes to Jaehyun when he asked her to prom eight months later. Jiwon shared all the gory details with her on the car ride home that day – "It was _so_ sweet, honestly, you should've been there to see it," – and Jisun felt like she was going to be sick to the Justin Timberlake that was blasting on the radio.

This, Jisun tried hard to forget, but still remembers: when she was sitting on her parent's couch in her parent's living room watching late night TV on her parent's television after Jiwon yelled, disappointed and loud enough for the entire neighborhood to hear – "You're such a _cunt!_" before flooring it to their school gym in her hand-me-down prom dress – she finally realized that _hey,_ she really did like Gyuri Jang so much that she wanted to kiss her.

Too bad, Jisun thought as a poorly-timed laugh track played on the screen, that she and Gyuri would probably never talk to each other again. It was the brand of high school level tragedy that'd probably haunt her until the day she died. 

BACK TO 3 HOURS AGO

"Wanna take a hit?"

Jisun looks down from where she'd been staring at Gyuri's ceiling, sitting with one leg tucked under the other, leaning back on her palms. It's the first thing Gyuri's said to her since the rest of the girls went to go find something to drink. She can hear their laughter floating up from the kitchen downstairs. "No, I'm good."

Gyuri shrugs and reaches over for the lighter, which happens to be right next to Jisun's outstretched foot. "'Kay," she says before flicking it on and bringing the flame to the tip. It glows as she inhales, and then a small snake of white slithers into the air. "You don't smoke?"

In the distance, Saerom starts screaming about someone spilling something. "We're fine!" Jiwon calls. Gyuri doesn't look like she wants to know. "And you do?" Jisun retorts. It comes out harsher than she intended it to.

Gyuri smiles, close-lipped and closed off. "Who doesn't, in college?" she asks. Her thumb flicks the lighter on and off absentmindedly. "With all the stress and everything." Through the haze of smoke, her eyes meet Jisun's. "Except for you, I guess."

"Except for me,” she echoes. Sometimes, Jisun wonders what it would've been like if they didn't spend the rest of the year after that kiss ignoring each other’s existence. Would they have ended up happy and gone to prom together? Or would Gyuri have broken her heart as gently and kindly as she could outside the gates of her grad ceremony, with that somewhat apologetic smile and a pile of graduation leis hanging around her neck, leaving Jisun to cry along to Jiwon's top 40 hits on the car ride back? Or, worse, would they still end up here, sitting across from each other again with the smell of weed curling around them, wondering in their shared silence about what could’ve been?

Other times, she wonders if it all just meant so little to Gyuri that, to compensate, it had to be Jisun who took the brunt of caring about these dead-ended possibilities enough for the two of them. Gyuri keeps looking at her like she has something else to say. Instead, she inhales again, exhaling a cloud of smoke. And when that clears, the look is gone, taking the possibility of conversation away along with it. 

LAST YEAR

In ninth grade, Jisun made up her ideal type. On the fly, when Jiwon asked her one day in the middle of gushing over some boy in her math class during lunch, Jisun constructed this idea that she'd only be happy with him if he was tall with symmetrically broad shoulders, a slim waist, and a small face, acknowledged as handsome by some universally-accepted beauty standard.

"Oh," she'd added belatedly, as she was munching on a carrot stick. "And he has to be crazy about me."

Jiwon looked at her like she was kneeling beside her on her deathbed, holding one of her old lady hands in both of her own, and about to say _I told you that you were going to die alone,_ right before Jisun eternally kicked the bucket. "Are you sure _you're_ not the crazy one?" she asked, quite seriously. Jisun just laughed at the face she was making and left it at that.

There was this point during Jisun's second year of university when she downloaded three different dating apps onto her phone and had a bunch of one-night stands with anyone who she thought physically fit the bill of her perfect man. In order to overcome fear, Jisun staunchly prescribed to the logic of exposing yourself to the fearful agent over and over again. In eighth grade, it'd been rated R horror movies that she pirated onto her brother's old laptop until it became infected with a virus. Eleventh grade, getting into Jiwon's car again after witnessing her running over her neighbor's mailbox. And, in her sophomore year of college, it just happened to be penises.

Funnily enough, she met Minho organically through their mutual CompSci class instead of one of those dating apps. Also, he laughed when she told him about the whole ideal type deal. "I don't think anyone like that exists in the world," he'd replied, honest.

"And that's why I had to settle for you," she joked. Minho was handsome enough, but he wasn't tall by societal standards, and the sex was fine but they were mutually not crazily in love with each other. He grinned at her in response before climbing out of bed to use her bathroom, fumbling to find the one light switch that still worked. Jisun turned onto her back and hoped he couldn't tell that she'd actually been half-serious.

By then, Facebook was a slowly-dying medium of social media among her peers, but every once in a while, when Jisun bothered to log in and wish someone a happy birthday, she'd gotten into the bad habit of scrolling down Gyuri's feed too. To make herself feel better, she'd clear her search history right after, but it wasn't like Gyuri posted that much anyway. There was a picture of her smiling and doing community service here, and a friend's album that she'd been tagged in there, and a status that she was in a relationship with some guy that, half a year later when Jisun checked again, had been mysteriously deleted.

Most of the time, Jisun could forget that there was a good reason that they didn't talk anymore. And when she did remember, it came as a violent, all-consuming realization that kept her awake at night, wondering that if halfway across the country, Gyuri was awake thinking about this moment only the two of them had experienced, too.

Other times, it was like this: "You know," Minho told her the day they broke up, right before winter break. _Okay,_ he'd said when Jisun brought it up, a little too uncannily easy, and then he stood up from where he'd been sitting on her bed and walked to the door, looking relatively unaffected. "Remember how you said your ideal type is this perfect guy, who's perfectly in love with you, and I told you he doesn't exist?"

He had this habit of blinking rapidly when he was thinking about what to say next. Jisun remembers because it freaked her out the first time she'd noticed, and she still thought it was weird long after she'd gotten used to it. "Don't take this the wrong way, but I think he's your ideal type because of that. Because _you know_ he doesn't exist."

"Oh," she’d replied. _Oh_ as in, one – shit, he was actually right. Two, for all Jisun convinced herself she was over Gyuri Jang after they both graduated high school, she most definitely wasn't, and she finally understood that once Minho pulled the door closed behind him.

Jisun laid awake that night, trying not to think about it. She stared into the abyss of her ceiling until she broke at four in the morning, reached over for her phone, and scrolled through Gyuri's Facebook again.

NOW

When Jisun tries to check the time, she finds out that her phone's dead. It must've happened sometime in between the biking and nursing her regretful, shoddily superglued-back-together broken heart. Briefly, she thought about if Jiwon tried calling her, wondering where she went. Or, even better, none of them noticed or cared that she'd magically disappeared, and they went on happily ignorant, living in their little suburban-girl fantasy.

But whatever heat Jisun had felt out of anger has long dissipated into the cool night air, leaving her feeling cold, somewhat hollow, and utterly alone in its wake. It's like, take away the flame Jisun's been tending into an inferno for all these years, and you’d find a pile of half-charred matchsticks, ready to be ignited by a stray spark all over again. And through the smoke, Gyuri's eyes meet hers like she still has something to say, and Jisun finally realizes how burnt out she feels from chasing down every what if, holding these possibilities hostage in her imagination.

She taps the home button again out of habit. All that greets her is a big, pitch black screen of nothing that she can see her tinted reflection in. Jisun sighs, stands up, and reaches for the handlebars of the bike. And then, like a dog with its tail between its legs, she starts back down to Gyuri's house.

2 HOURS AGO

They migrate down to the pool by nine o'clock. By then, the sky's become the blotchy purple of a quickly-falling dusk and Jisun doesn't know why she's still lingering around the fringes of an old friendship that existed only out of circumstance in the first place.

Gyuri quietly joins her on the evenly-cut grass as the others get into the water. "There's food if you want it," she tells her like it's a peace offering, sounding a lot more sober. She wipes the palm that touched the ground onto her light-wash jeans. "I don't know if you saw."

Jisun shakes her head. Sometime before the pizza Jiwon ordered came, Saerom had brought out a cake with candles crookedly stabbed into the frosting, and Jisun hid out in the bathroom while they drunkenly sang a congratulations song to their graduations in an off-key tune of _Happy Birthday._ She pointedly ignored the way she saw Hayoung throw her arms around Gyuri's shoulders, giggling against her cheek when Jisun finally joined them outside. "I'm not really hungry," she says, shrugging. Their eyes had met fleetingly before Gyuri's gaze flicked away from hers. Jisun thought of it like a victory, except she didn't know why she felt like she'd been left empty-handed instead.

Gyuri just nods in understanding with a small, meaningless smile on her lips. The two of them watch on in silence as Saerom pulls Hayoung into the pool from where she'd been sitting on the edge, soaking her feet. Gyuri laughs along with them, beside her. "This is nice," she starts again, hugging her knees. "Seeing each other again like this, after high school. Don't you think?"

Jisun keeps staring at these girls she'd known on a surface level since she was six, trying to see what Gyuri sees. Aside from Jiwon, who'd managed to update her on the entire half year of her life during their fifteen minute car ride, they might as well be almost-strangers. "I don't know what I think," she answers truthfully.

Gyuri rolls her eyes. "That's _so_ like you to say that." The tips of her long hair tickle Jisun's elbow in the wind. They still smell like that fruity, girlish shampoo she used back when Jisun was in eleventh grade and sitting next to her in that stupid advanced history class of theirs, and Jisun never told Jiwon this but she'd only signed up for it in the first place on the off-chance that they'd end up in the same period.

"You say that like we're friends," Jisun jokes. It digs a little too close to the truth, and they're silent for a moment as if to admit that.

In the pool, Jiwon squeals as the others gang up on her in Marco Polo. Jisun doesn't know if it's the lighting or something else, but Gyuri's eyes are glassy when she looks at her again. "I mean, I thought we were," she says. Her thumb rubs against the back of her other hand, folded around her knees. "For a little bit, at least. I guess not anymore."

Jisun watches as she bites her lip, nervously. It reminds her that the last time she'd stared at Gyuri's mouth, she realized that she wanted to know how it'd taste against hers, and that she'd wanted that want for a while by then, and that, by thinking these thoughts, she wasn't as straight as she always thought she was. Gyuri turns toward her again now, a quiet devastation on her pretty face as she asks, "Why aren't we friends, Jisun?"

There's a certain comedy in figuring out that you've been right all along. That something that means so much to one person can mean so little to another, and it's shitty but it's the goddamn truth, and the laugh track plays when the protagonist finally realizes that they've been desperately holding onto false hope all this time.

"We're not friends," Jisun begins slowly, careful not to forget something, "because you don't give a _fuck_ about being friends with me. Because you're just like every other privileged girl that lives in the suburbs who wants to 'do something' with their life, but honestly?" She hears herself raising her voice before she can stop. She doesn't really know why she's so angry about it, now. "You don't give a fuck about anything, and you don't give a fuck about other people, and you smoke your weed and pretend that you haven't hurt other people's feelings because you think you're too _good_ for everyone else!"

Gyuri's face steels. Jisun feels her chest heaving, out of breath. It feels like her heart’s going to explode, like she’s running past Gyuri’s mom at the door again as she calls _Is that you, Jisun? Jisun!_ after the kiss, like she’s back to being seventeen and in all-consuming love with Gyuri all over again, and like that’s some part of herself she’ll never be able to fully grow out of.

"Wow," Gyuri starts after a moment. Her voice quivers. "You're really still the same. You used to be like this too, you know, Jisun?” It looks like it pains her to say it. “You used to just – just _push_ people away like you didn't need anyone. Like you were above all that." She wipes her palms against her jeans again and stands up, looking down at her sadly. It was like she was the heroine and Jisun was some villain whose tragic backstory meant that all she'd needed to stop her wrongdoing was to be loved. "But you know what? You aren't. And it's so fucked up that after all these years, you haven't changed. _At all._"

The sun's disappeared behind the hill, and the night is colder than Jisun thought it'd be. Out of the corner of her eye, she can feel Jiwon staring at them from the pool. "I didn't want to be here," she finishes, lamely, as Gyuri starts walking away.

"Yeah?" Gyuri calls over her shoulder. She laughs humorlessly. "Then why'd you fucking come?”

Jisun doesn’t know, honestly. Maybe she thought they’d finally talk about the whole kissing thing. Maybe she thought that Gyuri would reach over for her hand as the sun went down, and that she’d smile at Jisun from across the cake, the smoke blurring her face after she blew out the candles. Maybe she thought that there’d just be some final clean-cut end to this thing, and that Jisun would move onto whatever was in the after once it was over.

Instead, all that’s left is the nearby sound of the girls splashing in the water, some vague street noise on the other side of Gyuri’s backgate, and a fuzzy sense of anger tingling in Jisun’s fingertips. She sees Gyuri’s old bike leaning between the recycling bin and garage on the way out. _Fuck this,_ Jisun thinks, and then she grabs the handlebars and starts down the street, pedaling until the American Dream-style houses of Gyuri's street and the what if's she'd held onto for so long blur into each other, and then the nothingness of night.

NOW

It's late by the time Jisun brakes in front of Gyuri's house. Or early – she can't exactly tell. The lights are off inside, and Jiwon's car isn't in the driveway anymore. There's only the white noise of the quiet and the sting of the pedal scraping the skin of Jisun's exposed ankle as she swings her leg over the bike.

Like this, Jisun can pretend that nothing happened. That Gyuri's house reverts back into its little snowglobe of time, and that she'll always think about the could've beens and imagine they'd have a chance to be together, in some alternate universe.

On the ride back, Jisun constructed this message that she wanted to send Gyuri. _I'm sorry,_ she imagined she'd start it. _For everything. It was a bitchy thing to say, and I didn't mean it. And you were right about me, too. It's just that I used to like you so much, and when we kissed it meant a lot to me, even if it didn't to you. And you don't have to forgive me or talk to me again._ Because Jisun didn’t want to turn these possibilities over and over again in her mind again. _I just... thought you should know, after all these years._

She accidentally blew past a red light in an empty intersection when she remembered she should probably mention – _Also, I don't know if you noticed, but I'm sorry I stole your bike. I don't think you've ridden it for a while, but I thought you should know that too, while I'm at it._

But Jisun remembers here, sitting on Gyuri's American Dream-esque front lawn, that her phone's dead. That things don't always go how you want, and it’s shitty but that’s just how life goddamn works. And that, closure or not, she has to force herself to move forward, past it all.

At some point before dawn breaks, Jisun picks herself up and starts back home. The blood from her scrape soaks into her sock, and the sun peeking over the horizon makes the sky flush a promising shade of bubblegum. And just like that, with the day, Jisun hopes she can also learn to start anew.

2 WEEKS LATER

Gyuri's sitting on the front steps when Jisun goes to load her boxes into her dad's car. "Shit," she flinches when Jisun lets the screen door slam behind her. "That scared me."

"What are you – " Jisun starts as she goes to rest the boxes against the railing of her front porch. She never did end up sending those messages, and Jiwon had ended up calling her that night – twenty-six times, actually. Gyuri, unsurprisingly, hadn't tried to contact her at all. Until today, for some reason. "What are you doing here?" she asks, swallowing her heart down from where she feels it beating in her throat.

Gyuri scrambles to her feet. "I rang the doorbell a few times," she says. "But no one answered," and _oh,_ Jisun vaguely remembers ignoring them, thinking it was some persistent door-to-door realtor again, "so I thought I'd just wait and see if I could catch you coming home. Um." She pauses, chewing her lip. "I – Jiwon said you were moving back tomorrow and I just – "

Jisun follows her gaze to the curb, where Gyuri's old bike lays on its side in the sun. _Oh._ "Can we talk?"

Putting a broken heart back together takes time, Jisun realizes. And she's lost the past four years staunchly insisting that she was fine even when it was like an emergency room patient saying they didn't need to be there right before they passed out from blood loss, and it's been so long that Jisun doesn’t know where to begin now, even with Gyuri standing right in front of her.

So: “Okay," she tries, re-balancing the box against her hip.

Gyuri looks up from the toes of her sneakers. "Okay?" she echoes, as if to make sure.

"Okay." Jisun tries a tentative smile. Gyuri gives her one in return. And yeah, Jisun thinks, squinting at the sun in the background, maybe this is how it starts.

**Author's Note:**

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